Karl Shapiro

The Dome Of Sunday - Poem by Karl Shapiro

Autoplay next video

With focus sharp as Flemish-painted face In film of varnish brightly fixed And through a polished hand-lens deeply seen, Sunday at noon through hyaline thin air Sees down the street, And in the camera of my eye depicts Row-houses and row-lives: Glass after glass, door after door the same, Face after face the same, the same, The brutal visibility the same;

As if one life emerging from one house Would pause, a single image caught between Two facing mirrors where vision multiplies Beyond perspective, A silent clatter in the high-speed eye Spinning out photo-circulars of sight.

I see slip to the curb the long machines Out of whose warm and windowed rooms pirouette Shellacked with silk and light The hard legs of our women. Our women are one woman, dressed in black. The carmine printed mouth And cheeks as soft as muslin-glass belong Outright to one dark dressy man, Merely a swagger at her curvy side. This is their visit to themselves: All day from porch to porch they weave A nonsense pattern through the even glare, Stealing in surfaces Cold vulgar glances at themselves.

And high up in the heated room all day I wait behind the plate glass pane for one, Hot as a voyeur for a glimpse of one, The vision to blot out this woman’s sheen; All day my sight records expensively Row-houses and row-lives.

But nothing happens; no diagonal With melting shadow falls across the curb: Neither the blinded negress lurching through fatigue, Nor exiles bleeding from their pores, Nor that bright bomb slipped lightly from its rack To splinter every silvered glass and crystal prism, Witch-bowl and perfume bottle And billion candle-power dressing-bulb, No direct hit to smash the shatter-proof And lodge at last the quivering needle Clean in the eye of one who stands transfixed In fascination of her brightness.